Digital imaging has vastly increased the ability for users to amass very large numbers of still images, video image sequences, and multimedia records combining one or more images and other content. (Still images, audio recordings, video sequences, and multimedia records are referred to collectively herein with the term “media assets.”) With very large numbers of media assets, organization becomes difficult.
Efforts have been made to aid users in organizing and utilizing media assets by assigning metadata to individual media assets that indicate a metric of expected value to the user. For example, the V-550 digital camera, marketed by Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, N.Y., includes a user control labeled “Share,” which can be actuated by the user to designate a respective image for preferential printing and e-mailing. This approach is useful, but limited by the metric being binary.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,484 to Cottrell, et al., entitled “System and method for automatically processing image data to provide images of optimal perceptual quality,” describes a system involving several image processing modules and a method for selecting an image processing parameter that will optimize image quality for a given digital image, using information about the image capture device and the intended image output device. The method involves calculating an image quality metric that can be expressed as a series of mathematical transformations. The parameters used to control the image processing modules are varied, the image quality metric is calculated for each permutation of the control parameters, and the control parameters setting which yielded the best value of the image quality metric are used to process the digital image. The method of Cottrell et al. is performed on an individual image basis and therefore does not include an assessment of the quality of the digital image in either a relative or absolute basis relative to other digital images.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,671,405 to Savakis, et al., entitled “Method for automatic assessment of emphasis and appeal in consumer images,” discloses an approach which computes a metric of “emphasis and appeal” of an image, without user intervention. A first metric is based upon a number of factors, which can include: image semantic content (e.g. people, faces); objective features (e.g., colorfulness and sharpness); and main subject features (e.g., size of the main subject). A second metric compares the factors relative to other images in a collection. The factors are integrated using a trained reasoning engine. The method described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2004/0075743 by Chantani et al., entitled “System and method for digital image selection,” is somewhat similar and discloses the sorting of images based upon user-selected parameters of semantic content or objective features in the images. These approaches have the advantage of working from the images themselves, but have the shortcoming of being computationally intensive.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,516,154 entitled “Image revising camera and method” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,930,718, entitled “Revised recapture camera and method,” both to Parulski, et al., disclose a digital camera system which allows a user to revise a captured image relative to a set of editorial suggestions which include cropping and recentering the main subject of the image. In the method of U.S. Pat. No. 6,930,718, user input is provided with respect to a preferred editorial suggestion. The image is then edited based on the user preferred suggestion or the preferred parameters are recorded for later use. In the method of U.S. Pat. No. 6,516,154, the digital camera is set to a corresponding capture configuration based on user input with respect to the preferred editorial suggestion. These approaches have the disadvantage of requiring user input and are not performed completely automatically.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0263092 to Fedorovskaya, et al., entitled “Value index from incomplete data,” discloses an image administration system and method to compute value indices from different combinations of capture data, intrinsic image data, image usage data, and user reaction data. This approach has the advantage of using combined data to calculate a value metric, but has the shortcoming of not utilizing data relevant to aesthetic value.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0285860 to Datta, et al., entitled “Studying aesthetics in photographic images using a computational approach,” discloses an approach to compute the aesthetic quality of images in which a one-dimensional support vector machine is used to find features with a noticeable correlation with user aesthetic ratings. Then, automated classifiers are constructed utilizing a simple feature selection heuristic. Numerical aesthetic ratings are inferred. This invention has the feature of automatically computing aesthetic ratings.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,816,847 to Toyama, entitled “Computerized aesthetic judgment of images,” discloses an approach to compute the aesthetic quality of images through the use of a trained and automated classifier based on features of the image. Recommendations to improve the aesthetic score based on the same features selected by the classifier can be generated with this method.
Ke, et al., in their article entitled “The design of high-level features for photo quality assessment” (Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 419-426, 2006) disclose an approach to classify images as either “high quality professional photos” or “consumer snapshots.” A number of features are proposed: spatial distribution of edges, color distribution, hue count, blur, contrast, and brightness. This approach is useful, but also limited by the metric being binary.